City’s radical past revealed in NYPD spy pics

The extremists and protesters who spread their messages of love and hate across the Big Apple a half-century ago were secretly surveilled by the NYPD, a trove of newly unearthed photos reveals.

Cops had their eye on the deadly Black Liberation Army, and somehow got their hands on a useful shot of 13 beret-wearing members of the radical terror outfit posing together for a group portrait.

The Communist Party, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and the neo-fascist, white-supremacist National Renaissance Party were spied on for criminal activity.

Some 60 photos were made available to The Post by the city’s Department of Records and Information Services, which acquired them from the NYPD.

Many of the groups’ protests parallel those of 2017 — and the similarities spurred Pauline Toole, the commissioner of the Department of Records and Information Services, to make them public.

“At this point in history, we thought it was a really interesting time to bring out some of the materials from the ’60s and ’70s and try to make connections between events that were happening then, and events happening today,” Toole told The Post on Thursday.

“There has been a lot more activism in the past several years in an organized way,” she said. “Because of the Black Lives Matter movement, because of the Women’s March, people organizing against the current president — his policies, at least — there’s a lot more interest.”

“This is what the New York City Police Department collected when they were doing their surveillance,” Toole said.

“Some of these photos were taken from above. Some were taken in the crowd. All were taken from public spaces. They didn’t think this was something someone was going to put into an exhibit some 50-some years later.

“At the time, it was like, ‘Look, here’s Muhammad Ali meeting with Louis Farrakhan and Nation of Islam, and this is something we should be worried about.’ ”

‘BLA surveillance’

Gregory P. Mango

On Sept. 18, 1973, cops snapped this photo in the Bronx of a suspected member of the Black Liberation Army — a militant group that terrorized the city and NYPD by assassinating officers on the street and tossing grenades into open patrol car windows. In 1971, five members fatally shot Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones, who were partners, in Harlem. The next year, four joined in fatally shooting Officers…